Journey, page 29
He came upon the trailered vehicle not ten miles down the county road. The driver sped just slightly and held the road straight. Marchuk drove an old Dodge pickup and he had his running lights turned off. He drifted up alongside the larger truck until he could see both men sitting wounded in the cab. When the driver turned and saw the old man coasting along beside him he panicked and swerved wide, caught the edge of the roadside drainage ditch and pulled back. The trailer nearly jackknifed before skittering back in line on the weather-buckled asphalt. Old man Marchuk cut into the other lane and the driver of the one-ton chickened out and slammed his brakes, went too far wide this time and ended up ploughing sandied ditchturf for about a hundred feet before the vehicle shuddered to a stop. Marchuk got out with the scattergun and pumped holes through the driver door.
* * *
—
Constable Tom Hoye got the call from dispatch and had to floor it from two townships over. He saw four red eyes in the road and then felt a series of little thuds on the car’s undercarriage. He drove on. The constable had lately been stationed at the lonely RCMP detachment that served the county, with its three-man rotation and one dispatch to cover four barren townships. They got calls of gunfire a few times a week and heard gunfire every night. That night was the first they’d gotten a call from the man who actually fired the shots, and that man went by the name of Marchuk. Hoye took the details as he drove.
“What’s he sayin’ he shot at?” Hoye said.
“Two men tryin’ to steal his ATVs,” said the girl at dispatch. “But he’s not sayin’ he shot at them. He’s sayin’ he shot them.”
“What?”
“How far out are you?”
“Seven or eight minutes. Where’s the EMT?”
“They won’t be a minute behind you if at all.”
* * *
—
When constable Hoye pulled up to the scene he saw the one-ton tipped over in the ditch, shards of window glass that shone by the light of the cruiser’s headlamps. Marchuk was leaning up against the side of his own truck, one foot crossed over the other, cradling his shotgun in the crook of his arm. The old man put one hand up against the headlights. Constable Hoye got out of the car with his hand on his pistol. He flicked the safety off as he stood. Marchuk just waited there, taking the air as the constable came over. Plains wind travelled warm and gentle through the pass. The faint sound of ambulance sirens called out from afar.
“Set your firearm down on the ground and step away,” Hoye said.
Marchuk frowned at him. Hoye had to pull his pistol and let it hang before the old man knelt and laid the weapon down on the tarmac. The constable waited until Marchuk stepped clear and then he gestured for him to keep going.
“Put your hands on the hood of your truck,” he said.
“Son, you are wastin’ my time,” the old man said.
“Put your fuckin’ hands on the hood I said. And stay put.”
Marchuk sauntered over and did it, slapping his palms down like a showy child. He stood there in his coveralls. Sandpaper beard and huge, crooked nose. Hoye passed him and stepped down into the ditch. Took his flashlight out of his belt and turned it on. When he shone the beam over the ditchhill he saw pieces of the truck’s upholstery scattered across the turf like cottongrass, a full section of door siding with thin furrows in the mold. Then he saw the two shot men. One was on his side in the ditchbasin, his legs shuffling. The other lay starfished against the hillside in his bandit-blacks and he didn’t move at all.
“Jesus fuckin’ Christ,” Hoye said.
He started to go for the men and then he stopped and levelled his pistol at Marchuk. The old man took his hands off the hood and put them up until Hoye barked at him to put them back. The constable came back into the road and took out his cuffs and braceletted the old man’s bony wrists.
“Just what the fuck are ye doin’, son?” said Marchuk.
“You shot those men?”
“They were robbin’ me.”
“Your farm is fuckin’ three miles thataway,” Hoye said, nodding south.
The old man stared at him sourfaced. The back of his scraggly head lit up in colours. An EMT wagon crested a rise in the roadway and coasted toward them. Hoye stepped out into the lane and waved it down.
* * *
—
He came home an hour before sunrise, the sky paling to the east. The constable and his wife had rented a two-storey brownstone with no house number. Just their name stencilled on the mailbox. Their nearest neighbour was a gravel quarry some three miles away. Hoye parked the cruiser in the driveway and went into the house through the sideporch entrance. He hung his keys and undressed, put his jacket and his Kevlar over the back of a wooden dining table chair. Laid his pants overtop, flat to the crease. Then he went to the fridge and knuckled up two bottles of beer. He sat on the living room couch with the TV on but nearly inaudible. The bottles were empty after maybe five pulls so he got up to grab another.
Hoye’s eyes had turned to slits when the stairwell groaned behind him. He stood up and saw his wife descending slowly, tiny bubble of tongue bit between her lips as she concentrated on landing each footfall. She followed a dogleg near the stairbottom and made her way down the last three steps. The young woman stood maybe five-foot-three with copper hair and a round, round belly pushing up the cloth of her nightie.
“Hey,” she said. “Nice outfit.”
Hoye stood there in his gitch, his blues unbuttoned and his undershirt showing. He had the legs of a quarterhorse.
“What time is it, Jenny?” he said.
“It’s not morning and it’s not night,” she said.
He watched her shuffle past the couch and she eyed him sidelong as she went. She started smiling, deep dimple at her right cheek.
“If you sneezed I think you might pop,” he said.
“Are you gonna go to bed or what?” she said.
“I didn’t really think that far ahead.”
“What happened out there?”
“That old fella Marchuk pumped about six rounds of buckshot into two city boys who were stealin’ his ATVs.”
“My God,” she said. “Are they alive?”
He nodded.
“Somehow.”
“How was he when you took him?”
“He didn’t think he did nothing wrong.”
She went into the kitchen and he heard the cupboards opening and closing. He came in to help her but she shooed him. Hoye got behind his wife and put his arms around her shoulders, held the belly in his big hands, his chin pinned to her shoulder blade. She reached up and cupped his cheek.
“Get off me you big oaf,” she said, but she didn’t move. Finally he kissed her neck and stood up tall, let her loose.
“Go to bed for a couple hours,” Jenny said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
So he did.
* * *
—
The two young burglars didn’t die but came about as close to it as they could. The driver lost one of his feet and the meat of his right triceps and he had nerve damage throughout. The other burglar flatlined three times during surgery and that was after he’d almost bled out in the ambulance. They were under police guard and would be until they were fit for trial. But not their trial. They had pled guilty by proxy and were sentenced to community service and probation. The trial they awaited was Marchuk’s. The old man had been arraigned and pled not guilty before cussing out the court and the sitting judge.
The old man had lands and money enough to post his bail-bond, high as it was, but some folks from that township and those that bordered somehow anted up the cost and posted for him. On a pretty autumn day Marchuk left the stationhouse shaking his head and then he drove back to his farm in his old Dodge. There he took back the tending of his property from cousins who had driven in from north-interior British Columbia. They didn’t go back. Instead they shacked up with him and awaited the trial.
* * *
—
The first attack against Hoye was no more than the rude spray painting of the words “Eastern Pig” on his garage door. He managed to acetone the graffiti clear before his wife got a chance to see it. Hoye heard rumblings of who might have done it and he let it be known that the drinking age in that county was about to be enforced nightly. Fines to be given out and liquor to be confiscated. Two weeks later somebody tore up the sideyard of his house by spinning doughnuts all over the crabgrassed turf. It happened when he was out on patrol and when he got home he found Jenny on the porch steps with a pump shotgun on her lap. Shells in a line on the wooden planking beside her. He had to talk a long time before he could get his gun back. They went inside and sat together in the kitchen.
“What, are they retarded or something?” she said.
“They just ain’t accustomed to having someone tell them no. But they’re gonna figure it out real quick.”
Jenny sipped at a glass of water, the fingers of her right hand lightly stained with gun grease.
“He nearly killed those kids.”
“They think it was justified.”
“We don’t live in Texas.”
“If we did he’d still be locked up. They would’ve had to be inside his house for him to open fire.”
“How much longer do we have before you can pick a new station?”
“One year, three months, and eighteen days.”
Jenny stood up slowly. Took up his empty beer bottle and carried it over to the counter. She got him another from the fridge and set it down.
“I just hope they quit it.”
Hoye pulled hard on the bottle, set it down on the kitchen table and stared at it. At the rough hand holding it.
“They will,” he said.
* * *
—
Jenny Hoye drove over an hour to get to the nearest big-box store. She took trips there weekly to load up on diapers and formula, toiletries, other household necessaries. From those narrow, sunbaked roads she saw miles and miles of shortgrassed dunes, low-rolling plains with not a pond or trickle of river. Rare sightings of stunted trees with their barks dried and sloughing. Remains of groundhogs and coyotes on the macadam or otherwise strewn in the roadside gravel. Once in a while a lonely oilfield pumpjack with its counterweight turning anticlockwise and its steel horsehead dipping low and rising again. There was a base and barracks in the town and on her visits she would see men in army camos trailing their wives down the aisles, some upright and solemn and others leaning down heavy to the carthandles as they shoved along.
She filled her cart and pushed it to the checkout line. When she rung through a young stockboy with a hairlip asked her if she needed a hand getting out. Jenny told him thanks but she’d be okay. He smiled shyly and went on. She wheeled the cart out into the lot and found her parking spot. As she was loading the trunk she heard someone calling her name. Jenny turned to see a young woman hailing her from across the lot.
“Fuck,” she said.
* * *
—
On the way home she saw a four-door pickup in her rear-view mirror and it stayed there. Monster tires and a heavy steel grillguard. Mud and muck on the hood and windshield. Jenny drove through town and took a turn that she didn’t need to take and the truck kept on straight. She snaked home through the county roads and there on the last length of dirt lane the jacked-up truck stood idling at an intersection, not a half-mile from her house. It pulled into the lane behind her and followed close. She could see sunburnt forearms hanging thick on either side of the vehicle. There were at least four men, two in front and the rest in back. She nearly drove on past the house but cut a hard right at the last second and skittered onto the gravel driveway. The truck slowed but kept on. Four sets of eyes on the woman as she got out and studied the vehicle and the muddied British Columbia plates. A gun rack had been fixed in the back window of the truck and all the brackets were full.
* * *
—
Hoye pulled into the farm’s frontlot at dusk with two cruisers trailing him. He saw lamplight through the thin-curtained upper windows. Brighter lights in the kitchen. The sound of country music and raised voices travelling raucous from an open side door. There was no proper driveway, just a ruined patch of land in front of the house filled with vehicles. Battered pickups and rusted-out car frames on blocks and a gargantuan
RV parked sidelong to the house, power cables running between the two like tentacles. A raised, extended-cab pickup with B.C. plates. Hoye pulled in first and the other cars followed. Each cruiser rode two officers and they got out armed and armoured and Hoye took two of them toward that kitchen side-entry. Hoye was certain that there would be dogs to give them away early, but there were not.
When they walked in through the kitchen screen door it squealed on its springs. Four men sat at a massive oak-slab table with bottles of beer and whiskey staining the lumber. Two women were tending the stove. One middle-aged and greying, stout and square-jawed. The other young and dirty blonde and very pretty, a scattering of old pox-scars on her cheek and forehead. Hoye and his two constables came into the room and spread out, eyeballed the foreign men, hands on the heels of their pistols. A door shut somewhere in the back of the house and soon enough the three other constables filled the doorway at the other side of the kitchen. Hoye knocked a stack of papers from a nearby chair where it sat below a wallmounted rotary phone. He spun the chair to the table and sat. Across from him sat old man Marchuk and he tried to stare a hole through Hoye. Black, biblical hate in his eyes. Hoye just stared back.
“You know that there’s warrants out for your cousins here, from B.C., and they’re to be escorted to the border and placed in custody there.”
“That is a load of horseshit,” Marchuk said. “What for?”
“I’ve got ‘Fight Causing a Disturbance’ for a Bretton Marchuk and ‘Cultivation of Marijuana’ for Gary Myshaniuk and Mark Oulette. The rest can just go in for assisting wanted fugitives.”
“They’re my guests and they aren’t goin’ anywheres. So you can go fuck yourself. You ain’t got no warrant or cause to come into my house.”
“We don’t need a warrant to seize the wanted men. But I’ll be kind and give them a chance to drive their asses outta here to the border under escort. Or they could get shot instead in this fuckin’ kitchen for all I care. Seems to be a way of life for you folks.”
Marchuk tried to get out of his chair and Hoye stood and sat him back down by the shoulder.
* * *
—
Old man Marchuk was taken into custody and locked up in the station holding cell while his cousins were driven west, handed off from detachment to detachment until they were released to officers from Golden. Bretton Marchuk had a broken nose plugged with bloody tissue when he was put under arrest inside British Columbia. The other men were marked with facial lacerations and contusions along their forearm and shinbones. The elder woman, wife to the cousin Marchuk, spat at one of the B.C. constables and then watched her husband take a baton to both of his knees. She held her spit from then on. The constables released the younger, blonde woman alone, and let her take the truck back to their lands in the foothills.
Marchuk saw his bail rescinded and spent his days and nights in holding at the Red Deer Remand Centre. He got letters and visits from townsfolk. Few people would speak to Hoye or his wife, any of the other officers or their families, even those born in that township. Hoye did not mind. One day he found their lawn staked with dozens of “For Sale” signs. He pulled them and stacked them in the garage.
* * *
—
On shift near Daysland, Constable Hoye had his radio flare up and the dispatch told him that his wife had been taken by ambulance to the hospital in Red Deer. Jenny Hoye had gone into labour nearly a full month early. The constable lit his sirens and drove those black nightroads with the gas pedal pinned. He pulled into the hospital lot just before midnight and found triage, took directions to the labour and delivery rooms.
Hoye wore scrubs over his uniform and they let him into delivery. Jenny gripped his hand hard. Her hair had gone dark with sweat and stuck to her forehead. She had taken no epidural and had just begun to crown. Hoye bent to better see her face. He wiped her brow with a wet cloth and tried to get the hair from her eyes.
“It’s alright, Jenny,” he said.
“Oh, fuck this,” she said.
The doctors had her breathe and push. She hollered and swore and gritted her teeth. Again and again until the baby’s shoulders cleared. The boy was born blue with the umbilical wound tight around his neck and upper arm. The doctors went to work unwinding the cord. Jenny had gone pale and stared at the little shut eyelids and the soft skin of his discoloured arms. Blood and mucous on her gown and at her inner thighs. Constable Hoye could barely stand and he waited cold by the hospital bed. It took four minutes for the baby to breathe and when he did he spoke in a wail and reached out with his tiny arms, cycled his feet in the air.
* * *
—
The constable watched his wife and son through the night and spoke to the attending doctors. The boy had no ill effects from the tangled cord and he’d been born heavy for a premature baby, had a strong heart and lungs to cry with. Hoye left in the morning and he hadn’t slept at all. He went to the house with a list and gathered things for his wife. He stood over the patch of kitchen floor where Jenny had been when her water broke. He didn’t know whether to clean it or not. After passing it by a few times on his rounds Hoye filled a bucket with soapy water and bleach and started mopping the tile.
